Doomsday Theories About The Universe

Universe is mysterious and fascinating. The little that we know about the universe is due to the efforts made to understand the working of the universe. We have even scratched heads as to how the universe came to existence in the first place and how shall it end. There are a number of impressive theories trying to explain the universe. Here, we give you some of the theories on how the universe will end.

The 10 Doomsday Theories:

10. The Heat Death of the Universe

Think, if the universe keeps expanding exponentially, what will happen. Galaxies will drift apart and the darkness in between will get wider and wider. What after that? The stars will get further and further, unable to illuminate the planets anymore. Ultimately the universe will go dark. The universe will be in a state of equilibrium, and that would be the end of everything. The eventual fate of the universe, from this view will be ‘heat death’. The universe largely follows thermodynamic system. Eventually hot heavy specks will spread over cold void creating a thin uniform mist turning the universe into a dark empty space.

9. Heat Death through Black Hole

There is a theory doing the rounds for sometimes that black holes would devour most of the matter in the universe. Complete darkness would prevail with a flash of light occasionally (whenever any object would be pulled close enough to a black hole to emit energy). After which everything would fall back to darkness again. The black hole would start devouring each other and will evaporate emitting “Hawking radiation.” With the death of the last black hole dies, we’ll be left with subatomic Hawking radiation particles.

8. The Big Crunch

The widely accepted theory of how the universe came into being is the Big Bang. From nothingness to something – all caused by an explosion. The Big Crunch is opposite to the Big Bang. According to this theory, Gravity slows the expansion of the universe. our ever expanding universe will one day halt and begin to contract, bringing all materials (planets, stars, galaxies et al) to the center (from where it had expanded out originally) wiping out everything in the process.

7. The Big Bounce

The Big Bounce is somewhat like the Big Crunch but this one is somewhat of a positive theory. Gravity slows the expansion of the universe and contracts everything back to the center. The force of that compression can very well cause another big bang/ explosion, and another new universe kicks off. So the universe bounces back. Considering this, a question comes to mind – is our universe the first of its kind or 394^th of the series? Interesting isn’t it?

6. The Big Rip

It may happen that the expansion of the universe accelerates so tremendously that it will ‘rip itself apart’. Our universe will become nothing. Evoking fear scientists have estimated that the Big Rip is to take place after 16 billion years from now and around that time planets will still be existent; imagine watching planet Earth ripped apart into minute pieces!

5. Time Will End

Scientists have theorized that time may someday stop. The same moment will continue timelessly. If so “Then everything will be frozen, like a snapshot of one instant, forever.” Though technically speaking there won’t ‘really’ be forever since we’ll be stuck in the same moment all eternity. But no worries “our planet will be long gone by then” – says Professor José Senovilla of the University of the Basque Country in Bilbao, Spain.

4. The Time Barrier

The possibility of multi-verse has been there but that gives rise to the problem of infinite-time universe where everything has a 100 percent chance of occurring. To understand the probabilities for it scientists took a section of the universe and started calculating which gave rise to another problem. It cut off sections of universes at the outer edges, just as we may cut off the outer edge of West Bengal (a state), if we drew a circle on the map of India. In estimated 3.7 billion years from now, we will be crossing that time barrier. And the universe will then come to an end.

3. Don’t Worry It Won’t

The universe won’t end simply because we live in a multi-universe and a universe may come to existence by the Big Bang or may become oblivious by a Big Crunch, a heat death, a Big Rip et al. Our universe is just one of many multi-universes, and though it may become oblivious one day, the fact remains that the larger “universe” will remain. And anyway in a multi-universe, new universes are born all the time.

2. Vacuum Metastability Event

Some scientists suggest that our universe is moving unstably on the edge of stabilitywhich is capable of getting disrupted and if disrupted the universe will enter a different state which is more stable. So some billion years later the universe will simply tip over the brink. And then a bubble of lower-energy vacuum will appear, just like that, out of the blue. This bubble will expand in all directions wiping out everything it touches. Weird!

Weirder is the fact that the universe will still exist after that, but with different laws of physics and different life forms.

1. The Eternal Universe

Well this theory states that the universe may never have to face its doom after all and may exist forever. Though the universe had a beginning it’ll have no end. In a cyclic manner the universe will expand and contract forever.

The universe emerged from a point of infinite density and temperature known as the ‘initial singularity’ but what if the singularity is not the beginning of time. In light of this view, scientists say that time could’ve existed before the Big Bang. And the Big Bang had resulted from a collision of branes – sheetlike spaces that exist within a higher-dimensional reality. These collisions might happen repeatedly, creating an eternal, cyclic universe so that the universe may go on and on forever. In the next 20 years scientist are hoping to make some substantial exciting observation on this theory.